With more and more content providers delivering video stream services over the Internet, user-perceived quality-of-experience has become an important differentiator. The quality-of-experience metric includes duration of rebuffering, startup delay, average playback bitrate, and the stability of that bitrate. There is little to no support in the network for optimizing or controlling these characteristics, forcing the client player unit to cope with the intermittent congestion, diverse bottlenecks, and other complexities of the Internet.
Modern client video players use bitrate adaptation logic in order to achieve a high quality-of-experience. Many proprietary implementations of video players have been fielded, but the first adaptive bit-rate HTTP-based streaming solution that is an international standard is Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH), also known as MPEG-DASH. The logic that performs the MPEG-DASH bit-rate adaptation within the video player unit, while currently superior to non-bit-rate adaptive players, has not been thoroughly optimized for quality-of-experience.